Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old charged with the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, was discovered with a brutal manifesto in which he admitted to the crime and apologized for the “strife” he caused, but stated plainly that “these parasites simply had it coming.”
Mangione was arrested Monday at a McDonalds in Altoona, Pennsylvania, carrying a 3-D printed gun similar to that used in the killing, several fake IDs, and the following manifesto. While sections of the manifesto have already been published, it was published in full on Tuesday by independent journalist Ken Klippenstein.
“To the Feds, I’ll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn’t working with anyone,” Mangione wrote.
“This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there,” he wrote.
“I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done,” Mangione wrote. “Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming.
“A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but [h]as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it,” he wrote.
“Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain,” Mangione wrote.
Mangione was likely referring to filmmaker Michael Moore, a staunch critic of the U.S. health care system who made the 2007 documentary Sicko, and Elizabeth Rosenthal, who wrote the 2017 book An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back.
The reality of the U.S. health care system is somehow even more grim than Mangione described. The U.S. was ranked sixtieth in the world for life expectancy per the most recent data from 2021, according to the U.S. News & World Report, and among its wealthy peer group in the OECD, the U.S. ranked 30 out of 38.
The U.S. does have the most expensive health care system in the world. Health care costs in the U.S. tallied up to an average of $12,318 per person in 2021, while in Germany, which has the second-most-expensive system, costs amounted to an average of $7,383 per person, according to the World Economic Forum.
“It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play,” Mangione concluded. “Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”
Mangione appeared in Blair County Court in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, Tuesday, where he was denied bail. On his way into the courtroom, Mangione could be heard shouting, “It’s completely out of touch and an insult to the intelligence of the American people and their lived experience!”
Mangione’s lawyer, Thomas Dickey, said that he would challenge his client’s extradition to New York.
